I've been getting more into the old flight sims and being a fiend of studying the original "army air corps" this seems like a great purchase. I actually have one of the original recruitment posters over my bed; I plan to be buried with it. :) But I do have two questions...

I've heard that RB 1 is great and RB 3D is great but RB 2 is pretty ugly. It looks from GOG's description that this set is just 1 and 3D, not 2. Not that it matters, but is this the case?

Second, and more important, I love a good flight/fight sim but some of them can be a little overwhelming in terms of realism. Example being IL-2 which is a great game but it took me so long to get the hang of flying before I could do anything else that I amost forgot it was supposed to be a combat sim. Realism is fine but I prefer it be adjustable so god forbid if I just wanted to take off and do some dog fighting I could without too much worry about hard it was to actually just keep those damn things in the air.

Thanks for any help.

This is actually RB3D + RB1. RB3D actually is just RB2 with a super-patch to make the game's graphics look much nicer. However, for some reason GOG does not include a glide wrapper with the game which the game needs to enable the 3D graphics in the game (last I checked anyway, GOG might've added it since) . This is a fairly easy fix as most glide wrappers will work with RB3D (and are free) but some may look better than others on your computer setup and you may prefer one over the other. nGlide is the glide wrapper GOG uses on all of its games now while zeckensack's glide wrapper is the one GOG used to use. CamelJockey made a glide wrapper for RB3D and several others work well too. There are also a lot of mods available for RB3D which affect gameplay + graphics. Other, more knowledgeable forumers, can give you the rundown on those. An important point is that GOG has a speed-setter program with RB3D to slow the game down. Without the 3D graphics enabled you definitely need this as this is one of those older 3D games where the game speed is tied to the frame rate. However, if the 3D graphics are enabled you can do away (may have to do away) with the slowing of the cpu (if you have one of the mods, you'll definitely have to raise the speed up to 100%). For the glide wrapper, all you have to do is download the glide2xx and glide3xx files into your game's folder and the game will be able to find them and you can check the box to enable 3D graphics. It should be pretty straightforward. Then you'll have nice 3D graphics.

The gameplay realism is a nice balance between super-realistic like IL-2 and arcade. It's fairly realistic, but there are no options for fuel mixtures or complex engine management. There are some tools as well which allow you to further adjust the realism than the options in the game (add stuff too) and mods can tweak the flight dynamics. Plus WWI aircraft are simpler to fly (well, in some ways, fewer controls anyway) than WWII or later craft. Even with the default settings, I think you'll find the game fairly easy to get into, but challenging in the right ways. It's considered to have one of the best dynamic campaigns in a flight sim.

Here's an old thread where a couple forumers helped me out with RB3D and downloading extra stuff for it:
http://www.gog.com/forum/red_baron_pack/q_lots_of_questions_on_red_baron_redux_and_glide_wrappers

There are more glide wrappers since then that work, but you get the idea. I think the weird menu color distortion is gone, but if not, there are some very simple workarounds for it.

Here's a way to get the intro video to play (requires an old codec no longer used anymore):
http://www.gog.com/forum/red_baron_pack/runs_w_windows_7_but_no_intro_movie
Good hunting!

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RB1 is the old DOS game which I still love dearly (I had the Apple version), but has very dated graphics. It's still a fun game though even beyond the nostalgia. It was the granddaddy of the dynamic campaign in flight sims and even has a couple features lacking in RB3D. The GOG screenshots are a mix of RB3D (without the 3D graphics enabled) and RB1.

To Dave,

Your links are all 404'ing. They are all missing "[url=" at the front

Downloading extra stuff:
http://www.gog.com/forum/red_baron_pack/q_lots_of_questions_on_red_baron_redux_and_glide_wrappers

Movie:
http://www.gog.com/forum/red_baron_pack/runs_w_windows_7_but_no_intro_movie


To Tiny,

Red Baron 3d is a great game, there are aspects to it's single player portion that has never been duplicated by any other game. All Campaign missions are completely random and fluid in the game. If you decide to not follow your squad's mission and fly off hundreds of miles from your flight path, you have a very good chance of coming across air activity from both sides. The game generates missions for most of the squads across the entire map.

I have a number of Glide Wrappers hosted here:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=e196374a237958b4#cid=E196374A237958B4&id=E196374A237958B4!248

All you have to do is put the contents into the main game folder (EX: C:\Games\GOG\RedBaronPack\RedBaron3D)

The one that is best and easiest to use (for me) is CJglide2x_02. I have used all of them sometime in the past on my various computers. Performance varies from computer to computer, so you may need to try all.

One suggestion, is once you get RB3D up and running on your computer with no hicups, make copies of the entire game folder, that way if while tweaking you mess it up beyhind your ability to repair, just restart with one of the copies instead of re-installing. I have about 20 copies of the game on my computer, ranging from pure stock install to enhanced mostly stock (Glide wrapper and modded terrain grahics) to totally modded versions of RB3D.

Whoa ... odd, GOG was having some problems with their forum and links yesterday, that must've been what caused this too.